In the mid-nineteenth century, scientists were excited about the electrical discharges that were produced in what we could consider the ancestor of neon signs: a closed glass tube about 90 cm long where each of its ends had been soldered. metal electrodes connected to a high voltage current. Under normal conditions, air is a poor conductor of electricity , but if the pressure is reduced enough by extracting a significant volume of air and an electrical voltage is applied, it becomes a conductor. What is observed is an electrical discharge, a bright beam of light traveling from the negative to the positive terminal. If more air is extracted, lowering the pressure to a thousandth of normal, the rays disappear and a dim luminosity fills the tube. In the 1870s the excellent experimental physicist William Crookes studied this discharge tube and perfected it, creating what became known as the Crookes Tube.
The only real technological complication was extracting the air from the tube. Once the tube was made and sealed, the electric current was applied and voila! an eerie light filled the room . The phenomenon was so fascinating and inexplicable that it astonished experts and laymen alike, and in 19th-century England it became a classic experiment for those scientists who made a living by touring the cities giving popular lectures.
A crucial month of November
This was Wilheim Conrad Röntgen’s field of work in his laboratory at the University of Würzburg: to study the properties of discharges in different types of vacuum tubes. And it was between November and December 1895 that the quiet, shy and lonely physicist discovered something that was to revolutionize medicine. Unfortunately, we do not really know what happened in those crucial weeks, as Röntgen had all his notes burned at his death . However, we can get a more or less approximate idea.
In early November he was experimenting with one of the discharge tubes to which he had added a thin aluminum window to allow the cathode rays to exit the tube, as he wanted to know what was happening to them outside the tube. To shield the fluorescence that was produced inside the tube, he covered everything with a piece of black cardboard. But then something extraordinary happened: putting it into operationRöntgen watched in surprise as a glow appeared on a nearby fluorescent screen.. Determined to verify such a peculiar observation, on the afternoon of November 8, 1895, Röntgen completely covered the tube with black cardboard, making sure that it was completely opaque: he turned off the light and turned on the tube and saw a faint glow on a bank of laboratory tests. He turned the tube on and off repeatedly, and the dim light continued to appear: it came from a fluorescent plate that he had consciously placed away from the tube. Röntgenhe began to suspect that it was some new kind of lightning. In the following weeks he did not leave his laboratory trying to understand the properties of what he called ‘X-rays’. One day, when he was testing the ability of different materials to stop X-rays, he saw his own skeleton flickering on the barium platinum cyanide fluorescent screen. At that moment he decided to keep all his research secret, without mentioning what he had discovered to anyone. As he later confessed to a friend, “I just told my wife that I was doing something that would make people, when they found out, say: ‘Röntgen has lost his mind’.” Six weeks later he decided to take the first X-ray in history. The guinea pig was the hand of his wife, Anna Bertha.When she saw his skeleton, she exclaimed, “I have seen my death!”.
The original article, On a new type of rays , together with the X-ray of his wife’s hand, was published on December 28, 1895 in the journal Proceedings of the Würzburg Physico-Medical Society. On January 4, 1896, he made his first public presentation before that society, with an x-ray of an assistant included, and the next day an Austrian newspaper showed him to the world.
X-ray frenzy
The craze broke out: everyone wanted their ‘bones portrait’, poems were published, and X-rays appeared in comic strips, short stories and advertising messages. Private detectives advertised themselves as using ‘Röntgen devices’ to track cheating spouses , and even lead underwear appeared to avoid prying ‘X-ray goggles’. Thomas Edison was among those who were eager to perfect Roentgen’s discovery: his goal was to build an X-ray lamp for home use, but he never succeeded.
Who soon saw the usefulness of this discovery was the medical class. The first use of X-rays in clinical conditions was made by John Hall-Edwards in England on January 11, 1896 , when he radiographed a needle stuck in a hand. And on February 14, 1896, this Birmingham doctor was also the first to use X-rays in a surgical operation. Weeks later, Ivan Romanovich Tarkhanov, director of the Department of Physiology at the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy, irradiated frogs and insects with X-rays, concluding that they “not only photograph, but also affect matter.” live”. His research showed that they influenced the central nervous system, the heart and embryonic development: radiobiology had just been born . In June 1896, X-rays were already being used to locate bullets in the wounded on the battlefield. Roentgen never applied for any patent on his X-rays because he believed that everyone should benefit from his work. His altruism came at a considerable personal cost: at the time of his death in 1923, Roentgen was bankrupt due to the inflation that followed World War I.
References
Bernal, JD (1976) Social history of science (volume I), Peninsula Editions
Boorstin, DJ (1986) The Discoverers, Review
Nitske, R. (1971) The Life of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, University of Arizona Press
